The Champs at Midseason

(2 of 3)

To the BLOHARDS that day—200 strong, overfilling the Yale Club ballroom—I read three bits from the book: the account of the Championship Trophy kicking off its Northeastern Tour at a club cocktail party last November; some of what you’ve read just above; and a report from the Upper Deck at Yankee Stadium, Game Seven, last October. People always like to hear about themselves, so the BLOHARDS received these purposefully chosen passages warmly. They chuckled in the right places.

From the dais, I experienced one exquisite moment. As I read about sliding into the ‘Gansett jingle during the bus trip, I did in fact try to slide into that “cracked, altogether awful tenor” of mine: “Hi, neighbor, have a ’Gansett/Give that lager beer a chance it/Has that straight from the barrel taste . . .” I could hear, over my own singing, humming from the assembled mass; I heard many seniors take up the verse, quietly, hesitantly: “In bottle, can, on tap it’s great/Yes ’Gansett’s got the flavor/Nar-ra-gan-sett flavor . . .” I glanced up for a moment, and noticed that the young lions among us were smiling, while the gray-haired were, almost to a man and woman, moving their lips. “A taste that’s light/But not too light/Straight from the barrel taste/That’s right!/That’s ’Gansett.” I was transported. I needed to pause before continuing. I was all choked up by a beer ad.

A little over a week ago, I was in Lowell, Massachusetts—we’ll return to Lowell shortly—and I was telling my friend Chaz Scoggins, a fine writer for the Lowell Sun who moonlights as the Sox’ official scorer, about that recent BLOHARDS lunch. “A couple of years ago, some of us were worried about the club,” I said. (I meant the BLOHARDS. We were worried about the parent club, too, of course—the Sox—but in this instance, I meant the BLOHARDS.) “We were having the lunches in this armory up on the East Side. Weird place. Steaks always tough as leather. One lunch, not great attendance, Trupiano was interviewing our special guest. Remember Nelson Bryant?”

“Who?” Scoggins knows everything about the Sox—he knows as much as Gammons—but he was drawing a blank.”

“Nelson Bryant?” I repeated. “Right?” I thought for a second, then recovered: “No, no. That was the fishing writer for the Times. I meant Bryant Nelson. Remember him? Utility infielder, usually second base. Had a mid-season cup of coffee with the Sox a few years back. With some other team now. Anyway, Trupiano’s interviewing Nelson Bryant—Bryant Nelson—who’s a very nice kid, and everyone’s being polite. But a whole chunk of the Q-and-A is about a crucial pinch-hit walk Bryant had drawn the night before. I’m sitting there listening, and I’m thinking: ‘This is what it’s come to. The BLOHARDS are doomed.’

“Well, now we get Bronson Arroyo and team execs, and we’re back at the Yale Club with a $75 price tag. How the mighty have risen!”

“That’s what’s happened everywhere with the Sox,” Scoggins said, taking my point. “Can’t touch a seat in Fenway. Can’t touch a seat here in Lowell for the Spinners games.” (The Spinners are the Red Sox’s single-A, short-season team, headquartered in a serene little 4,700-seat ballpark that sits on a bend in the Merrimack River about 30 miles northwest of Fenway.) “We’re the team, now. The Sox are the team to be.”

Which can often be a good thing. I can watch my team, even from Westchester County, far more often on ESPN and FOX than used to be the case. But it can also be a bad thing. Having won, we—we who for 86 years learned how not to win—suddenly expect to win. That’s bad, because we will not always win. And also: There are targets on everyone’s back. As a team, the Reigning World Champs wear an institutional target, never moreso than when their caravan rolls into towns like Kansas City or Tampa Bay, whose woebegone ballclubs would like nothing better than to beat the World Famous Manny-Papi-Johnny Show to a proper pulp. Furthermore, the kind of Reigning World Champs we are makes us particularly succulent. “We’re like zoo animals,” Johnny Damon said just last week. “People stop and stare and they can’t believe what they actually see when the Boston Red Sox are walking down the street.” If such a comment makes Sox fans like me say “cool, Dude,” it elicits in the Royals, once Johnny’s team, an impulse to drive the ball squarely between JD’s famously flowing, fabulously flamboyant follicles.

Moreover, as individuals, our players, especially the flashy ones like Damon, each wear a target, even—perhaps especially—among the faithful. (Just by the way: Who are all these people who have time to jaw on sports-talk radio at 3 p.m.? I do not know. I sometimes think the unemployment figure in Red Sox Nation must hover above 60 percent.) Jaw they do, on a daily basis, and not only about Bellhorn and Millar and Foulke but—still!—about Manny and even such as Wakefield (when he hit that bad patch). How quickly we forget. History will put into perspective what Wakefield (not to mention Manny and Mark and Keith) did for this franchise during the last post-season. In the tense present-tense, they are meat suitable for grilling. At every single appearance I’ve made this season with the book, I’ve been asked about Foulke. As if I knew?! My answer goes something like, “Well, when a guy’s got an 85 mph fastball, an 84 mph slider and an 83 mph change, a guy’s got a problem”—but I think that might not even have been mine. I think I stole it from Peter or Harold or Krukkie on Baseball Tonight.

I get emails about the book. Usually they’re missives written at 3 a.m. by Sons of Sam Horn members or other obsessives, pointing out that it was Waits, not Wise, in ’78, or that Leskanic has a k and a c. I thank these fans for their help. A couple of months ago, however, I got an email from a business trade group called NIRI. It asked if I might want to read and sign at their spring dinner and fundraiser which this year happened to be slated for a date in June at the Hall of Fame Room in . . . Fenway Park. I paused and re-read the invite. Would I, it was asking in essence, like to perform in Fenway? When I was 11 I dreamed on a daily basis of performing in Fenway. Of course, I dreamed of doing so as a heavy-hitting first baseman, and as I was then a very light-hitting first baseman on the Chelmsford Little League’s Dodgers, the dream was made of rather ephemeral stuff. But you take what you’re offered in life, and I responded with something like, “Would I?!?!?”

That was a fun night. The Sox of course were on the road, and part of the deal for this dinner was a formal tour of the ballpark. We didn’t get to go inside the scoreboard—too many rats?—but did visit the press box, where I’ve spent many an evening through the years, and also the terrific new seats atop the Green Monster (first time I’d been up there) and on the right-field roof. Fenway, empty, was gorgeous, and I was sanguine anew that the Henry/Luccino gang had pledged that the team will play forevermore in this park. Yankee Stadium is going to move next door in the Bronx, it was announced this spring. My friend Stan was telling me at a neighborhood party that this bothers him deeply. The new “Stadium” may turn out to be a fine replica of the original, but tomorrow’s players will not be treading upon the same sod—in the footsteps of—Derek and the Mick and Yogi and Whitey and Joe and Lou and the Babe.

Fenway, even as its luxurious (and hyper-pricey) upper realms reach higher into the Boston air, and as its capacity grows nearer to 40,000, will remain Fenway—by necessity small, quirky. Did you see on Friday night? Trot Nixon, no speedster, hit an inside-the-park homer when the Yanks’ new, not-the-answer centerfielder botched the drive and then saw the ball head toward that weird, wicked Fenway triangle. That was fun; Fenway’s always fun. Well, almost always. Next day Ortiz hit one out—except it wasn’t out, and Bernie Williams, a more experienced center fielder than young Milkie (or whatever the kid’s name is), somehow tracked it to the deepest corner of that triangle, 420 feet from home. Bernie reminded me, as he drifted smartly back under that towering fly, of Damon, Lynn, Reggie Smith—great Sox outfielders who knew how to navigate old, odd Fenway. For my money, it’s a very good thing that all future Sox will patrol the same grounds once ruled by those guys, by Manny and Pedro and the Rocket and Yaz and Dom and Johnny and Ted and . . . well, and the Babe. Fenway will turn 100 in 2012, the first American stadium to reach the century mark while still serving its original purpose. I’ve seen Ted play there (once); Yaz, a hundred times; Babe Parilli on a couple of occasions, when Tom Yawkey loaned out the place to the Pats, who erected bleachers in left-field and laid out the grid between home and the Teddy Ballgame bullpens (ordered built by Tom when he realized his star left-handed hitter could drop a few more dingers per year into them if right-field wasn’t quite so long a reach). I didn’t seen the Boss (Springsteen, not Steinbrenner) perform at the Fens last year, and I’ll miss the Stones this summer, but I saw great characters and moments—the Hawk, Spaceman, Luis; the comeback last October, even (ugh) Bucky—and it’s good to know that, down the road, I, Lucille and the kids will be able to experience much more of Fenway. I didn’t bring this up when chatting with Stan. Rather, I—very earnestly—commiserated. “Yeah,” I said. “That is a shame.” Then I changed the subject: “What’re you guys gonna do about center-field? Any clues?”

The affair at the Hall of Fame room was great fun and, for me, exciting. (Not least: Among the thank-you gifts I received were a Sox-specific Monopoly game and a bottle-opener with a button that plays Joe Castiglione’s radio calls of the seventh game against the Yanks and the fourth against the Cards. I can’t wait till the twins are old enough for family Monopoly. I’ve already used the bottle opener often, and have played it for Stan. He thinks it’s as silly as I think it brilliant.)

Far more low-key and slow-paced than the Fenway junket was a mini-tour I made of some great New England bookstores just after the Fourth of July. I piloted our beat-up Honda nearly 800 miles from Westchester up through Connecticut to Vermont, then back down to eastern Massachusetts, thence home, making three stops along the way. In the measure, I was able to take the pulse of Red Sox Nation as our team lurched and limped towards the All Star break.

First up, the fabulous Northshire Bookstore, which was drawing folks to the main drag of Manchester Village, Vermont, years before it was joined by the elegant outlet stores of Calvin, Ralph, Giorgio, the Brooks Bros and the rest. Bob and Zack greeted me warmly and treated me to cappuccino and a well-made sandwich (terrific local cheeses at play) in the store’s café. We talked Sox during the repast: Foulke, of course, and the previous night’s brutal loss to Cleveland. “Worst of the season,” Zack opined, and I quickly agreed.